When We Dead Awaken, a "dramatic epilogue", is the last play Henrik Ibsen ever wrote, published in the second half of 1899. The play contains heavy self-reasessment, is rather introvert, and is rather difficult to grasp. The main character, sculptor Arnold Rubek, is on a mountain resort with his wife, Maja. Here, he encounters a former model of his, Irene, whom he doesn`t recognize on the spot. Meanwhile, his wife goes hunting with a local sportsman, Ulfheim. Rubek and Irene remember the old days, discuss missed opportunities, and finally perish in an avalanche.
This play contains examples of the following tropes:
- Mind Screw: A rather confusing play, to be sure.
- Action Girl: Maja Rubek turns out to be one, up to and including hunting.
- Artist Disillusionment: Invoked. Rubek has it from the start of the play. Maja observes it, Rubek denies at first.
- Author Avatar: Rubek. He is an artist, discussing his life and work, and is confronted by a former model. Being a sculptor, she has posed for him. But then, she calls him a "poet" a number of times. That should be a solid giveaway on the avatar side.
- Back from the Dead: Irene. Comes with a close to Zombie expression when she is introduced.
- Bears Are Bad News: Ulfheim invites Maja and Rubek up to the mountains. He wishes to show them his hunting skills. And that doesn`t end well.
- Bedsheet Ghost: Irene is described with a white attire that comes pretty close to the classic Bedsheet Ghost. Even her head is wrapped in white.
- Birds of a Feather: Rubek and Irene both seem to hunger for the same solution, and she leads him on.
- Blood Knight: Ulfheim, a hunter, prefers to hunt down bears. He gives a lengthy description of the pleasure that he gets from killing them.
- Broken Bird: Irene. After Rubek, she has been into other men, but implies that she has offed more than one of them. Obsessed with death, anyone?
- Cataclysm Climax: Like Brand, this also ends with an avalanche.
- Cloud Cuckoolander: Irene. Lampshaded by the fact that unlike most of Ibsen`s borderline examples, this one is clinically insane, complete with Institutional Apparel (a straitjacket).
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Irene is always in a white attire. The nun who follows her, is, of course, in black.
- Dead Guy on Display: Irene, described as wearing funeral attire (white clothes), also sits like a corpse, with her arms crossed over her breast, almost motionless, a pale face, closed, dead eyes. When she moves, she walks almost like a zombie.
- The crossing of the arms is connected to the fact that she is in a strait jacket most of the time.
- Driven to Madness: Irene Implies that the men she met post Rubek, lost their wits. She drove them to madness. One of them were also Driven to Suicide. Another, she claims to have killed.
- Irene rambles on the fact that she really is dead (and so is Rubek), but it becomes painfully clear that she has spent some time in mental institutions. Her relationship with Rubek, and how it ended, seems to have done the trick for her. When she shows up in the play, she is seemingly still in lack of some marbles. Her "death" is her time on a mental ward. Possibly.
- Empty Eyes: Before Irene makes herself known to Rubek, she looks at him with "empty, expressionless eyes".
- Gilded Cage: Maja feels her marriage was like that. Ulfheim sets her free. Sort of.
- Gorn: Ulfheim has the habit of talking in rather gory metaphors, leaving nothing out. Maja finds it refreshing.
- Gory Discretion Shot: We catch up with Maja and her rifle after she has killed a bear. Also the tales told by Ulfheim. Nothing happens on stage.
- Goth: There is something vaguely gothic over this play. Courtesy of Irene.
- Hemo Erotic: Maja gets infatuated with Ulfheim the bear hunter because of his gory tales. He obviously revels in the carnage.
- Homo Erotic Subtext: If the nun`s reaction is anything to go for, she has a forceful out of character moment when she sees the avalanche, and Irene perishing in it. She screams her name an stretches out her arms for her, before she lapses back to her stoic state.
- I Die Free: Irene is prepared to take her own life if the nun comes for her.
- If I Can't Have You…: Irene is prepared to kill Rubek as well, when he tells her she isn`t that important.
- I Just Want to Be Free: Maja Rubek invokes it. She finds a new freedom with the bear hunter. The verse she made is repeated three times:
- I am free, I am free, I am free!My life as a captive is past!I am free as a bird, I am free!
- Sung for the last time while the avalanche is set off.
- Institutional Apparel: Irene, or rather the nun, has a strait jacket prepared for her in her suitcase.
- The Muse: Rubek saw Irene as such. Once he meets her again, he has the honor of meeting a dead one.
- Near-Rape Experience: Maja and the bear hunter at the start of the third act. It is possible that she led him on, at least some of the way.
- Night Swim Equals Death: On a symbolical level. Rubek has seen a lady taking a bath at midnight. It turns out to be Irene.
- Pygmalion Plot: Inverted. Insted of ensouling an inanimate statue and giving it life, the model has given her soul to the statue, and has become quite statuesque herself.
- Quieter Than Silence: At the opening of the play, Maja comments the silence to be so overwhelming she can hear it...
- The Quiet One: Irene is constantly followed by a nun, who never says a word, until the very end. The last line of the play, and then in the entire work of Ibsen, is uttered by her:
- Nun: Pax Vobiscum (Translated: Peace be with you). ([[Rule of Symbolism: Irene is the Greek word for Peace).
- Right before that, she screams "Irene" on the top of her lungs, in a great out of character moment.
- Rape Discretion Shot: The third act begins immidiately after Maja and Ulfheim had their ... intercourse.
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Reality Subtext: The play has death and rebirth as a central theme. Both Irene and Rubek seem to have a hang-up on the subject. The Reality Subtext becomes clear when considering that Ibsen had seven years to go (he died in 1906), and never wrote anything after this one.- In 1899, the same year as the publishing of this very play, Ibsen was honored with a life-size statue of himself in the middle of Christiania/Oslo. Making his Author Avatar into a sculptor, who feels rather shut off from the world, may be a subtle hint on what he felt when this honor was bestowed upon him.
- Really Gets Around: Ulfheim the bear hunter.
- Sir Swears-a-Lot: Ulfheim the bear hunter. Both gorn, swearing and a rather free attitude to sex falls on this character. A possible polar opposite to someone?
- Shadow Archetype: The nun. Commented on by Irene.
- Shout-Out / Take That!:
- To Knut Hamsun. It seems Ibsen makes a sarcastic attempt to meet Hamsun`s demand that the authors should write more about "the whispering of the blood and the prayers of the knuckles". Ibsen makes it up to eleven with Ulfheim, who seems to be rather gory. And in one of Hamsun`s early novels, Victoria, the hunter Glahn is a prominent character. Like Ulfheim, he has a fatal attraction on the ladies. The novel Pan is also referred to (Ulfheim is compared to a "faun").
- Also a shout out to the "White bear king Valemon" tale (East of the Sun, West of the Moon). Courtesy of the bear.
- As this is the last play of Ibsen, subtle hints can be found to earlier plays: Brand, The Master Builder, Peer Gynt...
- Straw Nihilist: Rubek is far into this territory.
- Soulless Shell: Irene admits that she let Rubek use her soul for his great work of art (a sculpture aptly named the day of resurrection). Since then, she has been deprived of her soul. No wonder she acts like a vampire.
- Surrounded by Idiots: Rubek feels that nobody actually takes the point of his art. And he is partly amused by it.
- Title Drop: The line "When we dead awaken" is given by Irene in a conversation with Rubek. As it happens, she presumes she, and Rubek alike, both are dead.
- The Undead: Irene shows herself as such in the first act. She claims to have been dead for a long time, and also has something of the classical vampire. Cue Drusilla.
- It seems she is close to a Revenant Zombie.
- Unfinished Business: Irene has some scores to settle with Rubek.
- Walking the Earth: Irene has done it ever since she and Rubek parted ways. She has left a number of dead men in her wake.
- Would Hurt a Child: ...and also the children she gave birth to, if she is to be trusted at all.
- You Are Already Dead: Irene says it to Rubek. The reason why she didn`t finish him off.
